


my love lies languished in loam and lake

by Bluecoeur (vietbluefic)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: (sorry lol), Alternate Universe - Fae, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Blood and Violence, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Dragons, Elves are Not Faeries, F/M, Fae & Fairies, Fae Magic, Faeries doing Faerie Things, Fairy Tale Curses, Fairy Tale Logic, Fairy Tale Retellings, Fire and Water Imagery, Frog Prince Reimagining, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, One Shot, Transformation, Unhappy Ending, Yussa is a gold dragon, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 21:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30146094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vietbluefic/pseuds/Bluecoeur
Summary: An old wizard once transforms a dragon into a fire salamander, pallid yellow, molten and magical, as retribution for some forgotten slight. Marion’s kiss jerks Yussa out of that skin, tosses him into the body of an elf and a man. For a while, he thinks she knew. Then he learns that Marion kisses everyone and everything. She’d have loved him even if he were a frog, or a flower.
Relationships: Yussa Errenis/Marion Lavorre | Ruby of the Sea
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	my love lies languished in loam and lake

**Author's Note:**

> Something very self-indulgent and also VERY tragic, inspired by the classic [Frog Prince](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frog_Prince) and elements of the Russian [Frog Princess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frog_Princess) too. I was in a mood hgkldshl;kgds. Fair warning to heed the tags; please take the MCD tag seriously!! I hope that those who DO continue still enjoy this. <33
> 
> As always, thank you for reading!

The faerie mistress holds his life inside a golden ball. She’d pricked his finger with a needle, and he’d watched his blood well a dark red pearl on the tip. This she pushed into an egg, and the egg into a duck, and the duck into a hare, and the hare into a box into a tree into the dirt of an island on the sea; and then the sea she poured into a ball of gold. She sealed the ball smooth, seamless, and now it glitters between her palms whenever she picks it up from her bedside each morning. She let him hold it — once — and against the skin of his hands, its surface sparked with cold, like ice on the sun. It had chilled him: knowing that even wrapped for safekeeping inside layer after layer of impossibilities, his soul is somewhere far beyond him.

“Suppose it is broken into?” he asks her. “Suppose someone cracks it open? Releases the sea, finds the island. Shakes down the box and peels everything back, until your needle is uncovered and broken.”

“It is not _my_ needle, Yussa,” is her laughing reply. She stands, towering, and kisses him. Her lips taste like the faint sugar in raw flower petals. They leave his mouth damp. She pulls back and says, “The rest of you is what is mine. Won’t you believe me when I say no harm will come to either? Don’t you believe me when I say you’ve nothing to fear?”

 _My love is what I fear most,_ he wants to say. But the words twist in him as if a dagger, hilted between clavicle and sternum. And what would be the point, anyway? Marion caresses him from cheekbone to ear-tip, and smiles, and her eyes are pale gold knots against a tapestry of richest scarlet-mahoganies. She’s beautiful the same undeniable way salmon in their rainbow-scales, and pikes in their vicious hunts, are beautiful. Yussa thinks maybe she can’t help but be cruel, too.

* * *

An old wizard once transforms a dragon into a fire salamander, pallid yellow, molten and magical, as retribution for some forgotten slight. Marion’s kiss jerks Yussa out of that skin, tosses him into the body of an elf and a man. For a while, he thinks she knew. Then he learns that Marion kisses everyone and everything. She’d have loved him even if he were a frog, or a flower.

As it is, however, he is a stupid mortal. And all stupid mortals owe a debt when faeries grant them a boon — such as a broken curse, for example.

“Oh,” Marion whispers. In a blink he’d gone from a little fire-lizard to a slim, dark humanoid shape. She kneels where he still sits dazed on the magma bank, and cups his face. Her fingers feel warm as the lava and softer than peonies. “Hello, little salamander. Will you come home with me?”

 _Home_ is the land of Faerie itself. Where summer lasts two eons, where autumn lasts three; where winter and spring last four and a half each. There, Yussa lives with Marion, dines with Marion, sleeps with Marion on a grand velvet bed. She sings songs that leave him frighteningly enthralled, makes up witty limericks, and weaves him shirts from stars and moonlight. He reads from a library of moss and stone, dresses in robes of silk damask, and tries to summon the strangled fire in him. Together they bake sweet things, and head outside to talk long with one another, breaking bread to feed the birds and insects and tiny lake-fish.

No one else will converse with him; the other faeries detest Yussa. The Ruby Lady loves him, and makes no attempt to hide it, and thus he feels their hatred like pinpricks along his back. Yussa is elf, and man, and trapped-deep-down dragon. He is too old for them who love children. He is too weary for them who covet innocence. The inner flame of his magic emits vapors, clashes with their earthy sorcery. Bursts sour across their tongues. Enchantment folds simmering over him, coils through his bones, and shoots sparks through his every footstep. Marion helps him paint his eyelids with mica, then kisses them to steal a delighted shimmer onto her lips. Yussa watches the other faeries grimace and turn aside when she does this.

“Why?” he asks her when they are alone. Her home nestles beside the flooded banks of the lake. Reeds sprout into the halls, smooth-washed pebbles spill across the thresholds. The walls are painted blue and silver.

“Why what?” she replies, tender as a sailor’s reddest sunrise.

“Why me? Why not any of them, instead?” Although they hate him, the faeries still do come flocking. They tap at Marion’s window and call in bellsong-voices and pretend they do not see him, golden-elven just the next room over. Still, they whisper. Their charcoal eyes rake over Marion when she laughs at a remark of Yussa’s — when she touches his face as though he is something small and precious. He claps his book shut and hisses, “You ought to direct your love to someone who’d worship the ground you walk upon proper. Who doesn’t fear you in a way you don’t deserve.”

Too late, he bites his lip, regretting the outburst. Her horned head lists to one side. She regards him with large eyes, overbright as the sun off snow. Her expression is surprised and then thoughtful.

He expects her to comment about the fear. Instead she says, “You think I deserve worship, Yussa?”

“No,” he admits. “But the others at least would have that to offer. I have nothing but a mortal body that is only half the truth, and magic that makes your lovers gag to smell its brimstone.”

“You offer your company.” She smiles. “You offer frank words and a burning face. After millennia of flowered poems and perfumed speech, I drink these down like the finest bourbon in all of Faerie.”

“Your people are capricious and unpredictable,” he adds, and truth flavors his words bitter. “How do you know they won’t _choose_ to hate you, simply because you won’t stop looking at me?”

He doesn’t say, _How do I know your love won’t cut me wide open, like a beast at the slaughterhouse?_

But Marion reaches out and draws him closer. Her fingers stroke and slide over the cold folds of his robes. He swallows at her touch.

“Little salamander,” she murmurs against his hairline. “My fire-breathing monster inside a man inside an elf, inside a coat of gold and jewels… What little space you bear behind your rib-cage, for the size of your dragon-heart.”

“You took it,” Yussa whispers — unsure whether he himself refers to the needle or something wholly else. “I have all the room there can be left, within.”

“Oh, Yussa,” Marion laughs. She cups his chin and tilts up his face, and her sweet smile fills his vision like the breadth of twilight. “I sealed your soul into a needle, in order to make way for the truth of you. But your heart, you’ve banded in iron. And _alas!_ I am a faerie. I cannot touch it.”

He shakes his head, baffled, unable to look away from her. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t fret. You will.” And she kisses his nose, his cheeks, his mouth, and then gathers him against her in an embrace, and Yussa is a stupid, foolish mortal who can’t bear to break away, despite himself.

* * *

Yussa was a fire salamander, is an elf; will be the dragon he truly is once more. Soon. _Soon._ Within the brown earth of his faerie-given skin, he burns. He _boils._ A dragon’s heart beats within him, and it threatens to shatter his bones to pieces and split his sinews apart if he attempts to transform this meager body now. No, Marion could not have pulled him from salamander-form into dragon-body without destroying his very existence. Rather, she’d done him a kindness by putting him in this one, instead, and thus he owes the faerie mistress for her gentle regard.

Even so. Even so. As years pass, as centuries go, as Marion loves and loves him while all the faeries avert their gazes— He smolders. Like breath upon embers set next to dry bushes, he knows: he cannot stay this way forever. He is not man, not true elf — but a beast beyond time and taming. And the truth of his being is awakening, slow but sure.

Yussa suffers nightmares about it. He dreams of the dragon-fire in him, bursting out of control. Of his flesh crumbling at the seams, unable to contain the inferno in him anymore. Marion had been wise to take out his soul: he’d have gone insane otherwise. Dragon-heart and dragon-magic and living, howling dragon-fire; these clash harsh against the enchanted webs of Faerie. How much more so then against the frail threads of mortality?

“You are cruel,” he once tells Marion. He is sweating, flushed and feverish. His magic wells in his eyes, in the follicles of his hair and cracks sunbursts from the beds of his fingernails. Marion lays a bundle of cool moss across his forehead, and Yussa shudders.

“You shouldn’t have kissed me,” he continues. His voice rasps, more than a bit delirious. “You should’ve left me a salamander. At least in that shape I could have borne the fire.”

“The one outside yourself, yes.” She kisses his face, and her lips feel like petals dropped gentle onto his skin. She comments, a touch wry, “You would’ve _popped_ within another month from the things building inside you. From your own fire, and from despair too, my love.”

He shudders again at that. _My love._ His love lodges again in that space between clavicle and sternum, choking him hard enough that he jolts to jostle it loose. He breathes raggedly, and Marion eventually has to bring him into her lake to cool him down. Faeries gather in the trees and brush and water-weeds all around. They watch with piercing, loathing eyes. But Marion ignores them, holds him, and ruins her dress sitting in the muddy shallows, singing songs to help soothe his pain and douse his hair with blessed ice-cold. He recovers a few days later. He knows it will happen again, and it does, worsening each time.

Other times, he dreams and his nightmares tilt a different angle. He dreams and sees innumerable faeries, everywhere, all around. Their eyes puncture, pinning him to the ground like swords through his marrow. He sees one — tall and proud and, like Marion, agonizingly beautiful — stick their hand into a pit of coals and pull out a wriggling salamander. He watches them hurl the creature against a wall, where it bursts in a splash of brightest lava-blood. “The dragon who was once a salamander is now a man,” proclaims another, and a third faerie takes up an axe, silver because iron would burn. And in his dream Yussa lies face-up in water, and knows that they mean to chop off his head, or to split him open, clavicle to sternum, to pour out his fire and his magic and his dragon-heart blood into the shallows of the lake, where it can do them no further harm. He would scream, but his tongue is a fire salamander’s, removed for alchemical potions. He would cry for Marion, but his love is trapped like a butterfly in his throat, and only the axe that the faeries swing up would release it to the air.

He dreams and never sees the axe descend.

He awakes to a growing burn under his ribs, and an empty bed.

* * *

“Marion.”

The house is darker blue, darker gray. The reeds shiver with the movements of fish and frogs. He follows them out the door into the overgrown outdoor wilds, the swirled starry skies of Faerie. It is night, the way night truly _is,_ here in these lands. Yussa clutches his chest, swallows down the prickle of bile or cinders, and calls again.

“Marion?”

“Here I am.”

She stands hip-deep in the lake, her cloak billowing, algae clung to her skirts like children. She smiles at him, and between her hands she holds the golden ball that contains his soul. Her horns cast twisted shadows over the water, which cavort and bend like suitors.

She whispers, “Here I am. You longed, and you looked, and now you have found me. O love, here I am.”

“What are you doing?” he whispers. The golden ball glints like a planet in her palms, but he cannot tear his gaze away from her serene face. Marion blinks slow at him, approaches wading towards him, and pushes the gold sphere into his hands.

“Ah, dearest dragon-heart,” she says, and around them the trees crackle, leaves breaking, twigs snapping. Yussa clutches the ball, which is cold as lakewater, and Marion cages him between her arms. “Kiss me,” she whispers as though a plea. He does, bewildered. Her hands slide through his hair down his shoulders around his arms, and her lips are too hot, too rough. Marion breaks away and looks him in the eye. There is dampness on her face, which means the tears must be his, because never has there been a faerie who knows how to weep.

“Don’t forget,” she says. “Remember what you first said to me. In the lavarock meadow, by a salamander’s fire-spring.”

Yussa has no time. The trees moan and the lake-mud splashes and Marion is smiling — still smiling — when the faeries rip her from him and split her open, clavicle to sternum, with an axe silver as moonlight and just as sharp. She gasps once. She shuts her eyes. She falls, and her horns break the surface like fallen logs. Her blood is apple-red as the rest of her, where it pours a cloud into the depths of their lake.

( _Will you come home with me?_ And Yussa had taken one look at her — with a man’s mortal eyes, and an elf’s mortal soul — and fallen half a step in love, and that was all it’d taken. And Yussa, stupid, foolish mortal Yussa, told her, “Where you go, I go. My body is your own.” My body is your own.)

Marion’s life winks out, swift as a blade-glint. And in the next moment, Yussa’s love bursts screaming out from him, along with rage, despair, and the howling wailing blaze of his heart-fire.Faeries flee. Trees ignite. His tongue is no elf’s, no salamander’s, black and forked like this. Gently, Marion’s blood in the water touches Yussa’s burning legs — stains his skin — right before his bones and tendons and sinews crack in the heat, and shatter apart only to release, and reform, roaring, the dragon once locked within.

* * *

All of Faerie burns.

* * *

Claws close around a golden ball.

The lady in the lake sinks, unburned, unharmed by any of the flames, sweet water in her chest, while a dragon takes to the fiery sky.


End file.
